Vingenzo’s, Woodstock GA

Well, here’s a surprise. This pizza restaurant in Woodstock completely blindsided me. A couple of years ago, when everybody was going nuts – and rightly so – about the mighty and wonderful Varasano’s, this place calmly opened and casually revealed a product every bit as good, only with a wider menu and a much more laid-back and relaxed atmosphere, with no pretension or artifice. Seriously, I’ve had several truly great pies at Varasano’s, and one visit which was a little disappointing, but Vingenzo’s is every bit as wonderful as Varasano’s at their best and, honestly, surpasses them in an area or two. I think that I might have found a new favorite pizza place in the Atlanta area.

Neopolitan pies are the order of the day here. Just about everything is handmade, down to the cheeses, and served up on eleven-inch pies. I think that two of these should feed three people.

On Wednesday, the four of us came up here, meeting our friends Neal, Donna and Eric for supper. My daughter was under orders not to protest or make any hints; she was on my list for overindulging at breakfast. My son, getting over a cold, had lost his voice, and so he, literally, pointed out several interesting pies from their menu that he’d like to try. I recommend that everybody try this out themselves one day soon. It’s so much nicer and more pleasant selecting pizza when one child cannot protest and the other has been strongly warned not to.

We had an awesome server who went over everything and made some suggestions, encouraging us to try their mozzarella pairings. These appetizers, priced between $7-10 each, give you a good portion of cheese along with something else to complement the taste. I tried the very soft mozzarella di bufala with a little pepper, served with a few leaves of mixed greens and two white anchovies. It was completely delicious. Neal had a different, creamier cheese, Stracciatella di Burrata, that came with greens, cherry tomatoes and capers. If you’re sharing, then for $18 you can get the “Grand Tasting,” which gives you each of Vingenzo’s three cheeses along with the small salad, peppers, capers and two types of olives. You don’t get the delicious anchovies this way, but I expect that many of my readers probably don’t care for those anyway.

Marie was not feeling especially hungry, so she enjoyed a bowl of pasta e fagioli soup for dinner along with a good bit of bread. You’ll definitely want to try this; it’s a pizza crust, basically, with olive oil and a little parmesan. The children and I, meanwhile, split two pizzas and I think that we chose well. The Regina comes with sausage and wild mushrooms and that was pretty knockdown good on its own, but the other pie, Bianca con Prosciutto e Fontina, was the master stroke. It came with prosciutto and a heap of arugula atop more of this amazing cheese. It is very similar to the excellent Nucci pizza at Varasano’s, but heaven help me, I liked this even better. I don’t know where the notion of mixing arugula and salty meats together originated, but I sure am glad that somebody figured it out.

Vingenzo’s also makes fresh pasta – Neal said that his was wonderful and Donna and Eric also enjoyed their linguine – with a variety of sauces and toppings that all sound amazing. With an introductory meal this good and a menu this dense, this is absolutely a place that needs revisiting, and without delay. Heck, one of these days, I’d like to start working on the wine list here, too. I am really glad that we found this place, and look forward to another visit soon.

The Tomato Head, Knoxville TN

If you’ve been following our stories here, you’ve read that my son has returned to the Atlanta area and is living with us again. When we started the blog about a year ago, my son had been with his mother in Louisville, Kentucky, for about five months. We were glad to have him back for spring break last year, and for a few months in the summer, and anticipated him returning this coming fall for high school. He decided over Christmas break, a few days before my father passed, that he wanted to stay with us, and not return to Louisville. Continue reading “The Tomato Head, Knoxville TN” →

Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN

So I was reading the tie-in book for Guy Fieri’s Food Network TV series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and I told myself, “Self, you totally need to eat at some of these places.” A few months after that, in the summer of ’09, Marie and I started talking about where we’d like to go for our honeymoon and we settled on a big old road trip. As I’m recounting in my first-of-each-month honeymoon flashbacks, this trip started in Charlotte, wound its way up to Montreal and finished, ten days later, in one of our favorite towns, Knoxville, where we met up with the children after they spent two weeks’ summer vacation with their mom. There, we settled in for supper at one of three Triple-D restaurants that were featured on Fieri’s show and book which we were able to visit on our trip. Continue reading “Pizza Palace, Knoxville TN” →

Big Pie in the Sky, Kennesaw GA

I am sure that many fine pictures have been taken around Kennesaw Mountain and its battlefield, but I’m willing to wager that over the last eighteen months, Big Pie in the Sky has become the single most photographed place in that area. Marie and I risked the crowd last Friday night for a quiet little getaway – we didn’t get the “quiet” part – while our daughter went to a football game, and you’d think every single guest that night was a blogger snapping pictures of the building and their pies. At one point, Marie got up to help a family take a photo of a mother and her wide-smiling twelve year-old in front of the words “MAN V. FOOD” painted on the front window. The mother explained that her son saw this place on the infamous Travel Channel program and asked to come here for a birthday treat. From McDonough. I told her that boy’s all right by me.

Like most of us, I first heard of Big Pie in the Sky when the restaurant and its celebrated “Carnivore Challenge” appeared on Man vs. Food. The particulars of that business have already been detailed on plenty of other blogs and needn’t be repeated here. Our pal David recorded the Atlanta-set episode when it was first broadcast and sent me a copy with a note that this previously unknown place was something to see.

A few Saturdays after we watched the episode, we came out to Kennesaw for one of the biggest mobs we’ve seen at a suburban restaurant, and almost two hour wait. We figured we’d come back another time. Almost eighteen months later, the crowds are still enormous, the seating is still a nightmare, the wait’s still a good 45 minutes on an early Friday evening and lengthening as the night goes on, and I’m of the opinion that it’s worth it.

The problem, of course, is that the publicity brought on by the TV appearance has brought a much larger crowd than the small storefront can easily handle. It’s apparently not uncommon for guests, who place their orders and pay upon arrival, to stand around hovering with their order numbers waiting for a table to clear. In the evening, the three outdoor tables belonging to the coffee shop next door become available, but it doesn’t help the bottleneck very much.

Having said that, we’ve certainly visited other places that have made impressive appearances on popular TV programs, and the crowds eventually die off a little. But Big Pie in the Sky is so consistently popular that much of this weekend mob is repeat business. Everybody except for the kids – and there were a lot of children here – is pretty patient with the service. On that note, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t call this service good at all. However, you have to make exceptions when the restaurant is such a chaotic zoo. It is unbelievably loud and ridiculous here, and I realize that I might be describing what some might consider the least appealing night out ever devised. Between ordering up front, fighting for a table, waiting in a line to refill your drink and having kids chase each other around your chairs as overworked servers try desperately not to drop pies while bellowing out your table number, this is assuredly not a restaurant for everybody.

Having said that, if you like a good pizza as much as Marie and I do, you should be ready to deal with dining room chaos, no matter how wild. Or just take an outdoor table like we did, which minimizes the madness. We shared a supreme with olives only on half – Marie doesn’t loathe olives the way that she does bacon, but she’s still awfully funny about them – and I thought it quite good, with a soft, chewy crust and very tasty sauce and cheese. A sixteen-inch pie gets you eight big slices for under twenty bucks.

In our case, some of the leftovers were very much appreciated. Our daughter announced that there had been nothing to eat at the football game – she might possibly have been fibbing there – and that she was going to die of starvation. Thank heaven we had two slices set aside for her; we wouldn’t want anybody to starve to death.

Other blog posts about Big Pie in the Sky:

Atlanta Restaurant Blog (May 1 2009)
Amy on Food (Aug. 14 2010)

Bella’s Pizzeria, Smyrna GA

It’s always a little discouraging when a place that you know to be capable of giving you a good meal lets you down. We don’t eat at Bella’s very often – perhaps eight or nine times over the years – but it has a deserved reputation for giving you a perfectly good New York-style pie. It’s certainly nowhere near the best in the region, and not in my top five, but I’ve always felt it to be a reliable place.

It’s a sports bar, basically. I’m not sure how much of its loud, late-evening hoopla was designed and how much evolved from answering customer requests for things to do, but over time they’ve introduced Team Trivia and other games, and usually have live music – blues and classic rock covers, mainly – on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s a very fun neighborhood pizza place. The pie’s usually pretty good, and you can complement it with a very decent side salad with a delicious house dressing or some garlic knots which put most of their rivals to shame, and they offer Boylan’s sodas by the bottle. It’s a good place.

This past week, we had the first subpar meal we’ve ever had at Bella’s. We had a veggie pie and a stuffed pie with meatballs and ham, and neither was worth writing home about. They were certainly better than what Domino’s might like to deliver, but not at all like what I have had in the past. The dough didn’t taste right, and the sauce seemed bland and canned. I thought the cheese was fine, and the veggie toppings were all quite good, but it just felt like it was made without attention to detail. It didn’t have any spark.

When this happens with pizza, it’s hugely aggravating because you’re sharing with the group. Marie, my daughter and I met Neal here and we could all only agree that the food was “all right.” Sadly, the blow to the wallet seems a lot harsher when your meal isn’t a standout. Bella’s seems a little pricier than most of its competitors anyway, but they do offer coupons which aren’t hard to find. In fact, we got our coupon from my folks, who eat here all the time. My dad is often found shopping in that strip mall, and he loves Bella’s, but he’s also honest about their inconsistency. Most of the time, they’re pretty good, once in a while they are outstanding, and once in a very long while, they’re bland and disappointing.

I’ve mentioned before that 2004 was something of a mistake-filled year for me. The very last time one of those mistakes and I had supper together, I brought her and her daughter here. The pizza that night was completely amazing, although I think that the girl I was seeing was a little too distracted by her daughter’s really awful conduct that night to notice. I’m willing to cut Bella’s a little slack, because I know first-hand that they can do better. That and those garlic knots will knock you out.

Antico Pizza, Atlanta GA

Some chapters back, I suggested that Atlanta’s top five pizzerias are probably good enough to challenge any other city’s top five pizzerias, or at the very least good enough for myself and a representative of Chicago to at the very least greatly enjoy every last bite of proving the other wrong. I had been hearing really great things about Antico, a teeny little place on Hemphill just down the road from Ikea, and wondered whether it would be good enough to break into my personal list of the metro area’s top five.

Wonder no more; it isn’t. It’s still quite good, and certainly worth a visit, but I didn’t leave as satisfied as I had hoped.

Antico’s pies are very tasty, large enough for two, and come to around twenty bucks. They use fresh ingredients, including some amazing cherry tomatoes and wonderfully tasty bufala cheese. If they could just do something about the presentation, it would elevate a good meal into something special.

Antico is easy to find. It’s easy to drive right past, too, as Neal and I discovered early Thursday evening. He had the day off and suggested we get together for supper before our usual Thursday night get-together with friends, and I suggested pizza. We found the place with no difficulty, and arrived before the evening dinner rush.

The restaurant appears to have a very limited seating area, doing most of its business as takeout. It turned out that the room that I thought was merely the kitchen actually doubled as a dining room, with space for more than twice as many customers. I can’t swear that I’ve ever seen that kind of setup before.

But even before we sat down at what appeared to have been Antico’s only table, I had gone off the place. We placed our order at the register with an unpleasantly surly woman who grouchily told us the house rules and that there were no substitutions. That’s actually a rule that I’m fine with; I figure that if you’re one of those people who tries to order a Reuben with cole slaw instead of kraut, you’ve got no business ordering a Reuben in the first place. Anyway, she was a grouch, and underlining it the emphatic way that she did annoyed me, and the only drink options are bottled (teas, water and three Coke products), which I didn’t like either. Then we had to read something before we sat down.

Okay, so there’s a single large table in what appeared to be the only seating area. You have to pass through this room to get to the combination kitchen/dining room. The table seats eight, and so I figured this would be a nice little shared experience similar to how they serve up at the Smith House in Dahlonega. Only the Smith House employs an army of incredibly friendly servers who routinely check on you and make sure that you’re doing fine, and the Smith House would never, ever do anything so unbelievably tacky as tape a label to every seat around the table which read something like “If you move this seat, you will be asked to leave.” Neal and I, who took places at the far corner of the table, each seem to spend an inordinate amount of time with our eyebrows raised over some damn fool thing or other, but that warning on those chairs really might take some beating.

After an agreeably short wait, a server whose face I never saw appeared between us to drop a large metal serving tray on the table. Apparently you don’t get individual plates here, either, although you do get quite a lot of pizza grease. If the pie wasn’t made from excellent dough with such good ingredients, it would have been worth complaining about. I just shrugged, tore a section from the roll of paper towels on the table and soaked up a little of the oil before eating. Varasano’s, my favorite pizza in the city, used to get some stick for its pies having damp centers, but I’ve never seen as much oil and grease on a Varasano’s pie as what I sopped up last night.

I’m probably making this experience sound a lot worse than it was. Every restaurant, after all, has the right to restrict its drink selections, label its chairs the way they want, and even leave diners abandoned without a greeting, a how-is-everything, or any other cordial triviality, and I treat these as part of a restaurant’s character and these eccentricities as charming in their own way, and don’t wish for them to sound like complaints. Antico makes a simply excellent pizza, despite their odd choices, and if I lived in the neighborhood, I would probably eat here regularly. That is, if I didn’t feel like driving to one of at least five better places in the city.

Reviews of Antico have appeared on dozens of blogs. A few of these are…

Amy on Food (Oct. 3 2009)
Eat It, Atlanta (Oct. 11 2009)
Octosquid (Oct. 16 2009)
Atlanta Etc. (Dec. 10 2009)
Lane Chapman (Jan. 30 2010)

Al’s Pizza, Jacksonville FL

How do you like this? I sort of pipe-dream, considering an ability to get out more, and possibly run up an expense account, of this blog building into a remarkable travel story full of crawfish boils in New Orleans and lobster feasts in Maine, and yet here we have our first out-of-state visit since we started writing about our meals and it’s to Florida, a state I’ve successfully avoided since I was about nine. Continue reading “Al’s Pizza, Jacksonville FL” →